Sony has refreshed its notebook range, with a colourful collection of glowing models and lightweight dual-battery options.
The new Vaio C series features a translucent lid that gathers natural light and reflects it throughout the body, creating a fluorescent glow effect. The notebooks include a 14in LED-backlit display, a 3D …

Why the cheap feel?

Pity these look (and will almost certainly feel) cheap and plasticky, like practically every other laptop on the market.

I'm certainly no fan of Apple but I couldn't find anything at all comparable in quality feel to the 13" Macbook Pro when I was looking earlier this month.

You can certainly get much better specs for much less cash (it's definitely not worth the full £1020) but overall the solid quality feel and the superb trackpad are unmatched as far as I can see and it's easily powerful enough for what it was purchased for.

About time Sony et al got their act together and started building some solid feeling and classy looking machines instead of charging premium prices for things that feel like they came free with cereal...

What a waste

In the interest of battery life, wouldn't it be sensible to have a reflector on the inside of the lid to use as much of the backlight energy as possible for the purpose it was intended. Not that it matters as you'd be stupid to buy from a company that could arbitrarily decide tomorrow to stop supporting advertised features as they *might* be used for piracy.

Dual batteries?

@James Hughes 1

The Thinkpad T20s had that feature 10 years ago - a hot swappable "snazzy name"-bay that could be used for CD drive (this was before DVDs came along), a spare battery, and possibly as extended storage to expand the 10GB drive it came with, but my memory might be playing tricks on my aged mind.

I think what Sony are offering are the option to have a spare battery on top of the normal one, without having to lose some other functionality (such as the optical drive). I presume the USP is that unlike having to choose whether to go with the big longlife battery or small normal one before you boot up, you can change whilst the machine is running, without having to reboot (assuming you cannot just plug it in and then change batteries). Not much of a feature in my opinion...